From left: Steve Witkoff, Ruby Schron and the Woolworth building
An Israeli investor has signed a contract to buy the top 25 floors of the Woolworth building for about $70 million, Crain’s reported. The deal comes six weeks after reports first emerged that Steve Witkoff’s Witkoff Group and Ruby Schron’s Cammeby’s International were considering a sale of the upper portion of the property, which has remained vacant for years in advance of a residential or hotel conversion. [more]
From left: Steve Witkoff, Ruby Schron and the Woolworth building
The Witkoff Group and Cammeby’s International partnership that owns the historic Woolworth building is in talks to sell the property for as much as $500 million, the New York Post reported. Steve Witkoff and Ruby Schron’s companies joined forces to purchase the 59-story, 935,633-square-foot building, at 233 Broadway near Barclay Street, for $137.5 million in 1998. [more]
The wheels are finally turning on the long-awaited conversion at the top of the Woolworth Building. According to the Post, the building’s ownership is prepared to make a decision on whether the upper portion of the building will be rental apartments or a hotel within the next 30 to 45 days. Office tenants at the 57-story landmark currently occupy floors as high up as the 27th — above that, the floors are vacant, said Steve Witkoff, CEO of the Witkoff Group and a partner in the building’s ownership group, which also includes Cammeby’s International head Ruby Schron. Floors 28 and up are also served by separate elevator banks, and permits to move the stairways and elevators on floors 30 through 47 — a $6 million project — were approved by the Department of Buildings earlier this month. [more]
From the May issue: With 7.6 million square feet of commercial space under construction at the World Trade Center site, the New York City skyline may appear to be adding an unprecedented amount of office space. But a closer look shows that office builders were far busier in the previous periods of Manhattan history.
New Yorkers accustomed to cranes looming overhead might be surprised to hear that Manhattan commercial construction is in one of the slowest periods of the past century, according to a recent report by Newmark Knight Frank. In fact, Manhattan lost more office space than it gained in the aughts, according to the report, which details how the city’s commercial construction has ebbed and flowed over the past 100 years.
And even as commercial lending begins to rebound, experts say they don’t expect a huge burst of activity in the next few years, despite activity at the World Trade Center site and, eventually, Hudson Yards. [more]
Jeffrey Levine of Douglaston Development talks to Core’s Shaun Osher about his life as a developer and the Edge, the developer’s North Williamsburg waterfront condominium complex, in the video above. Levine says in the last six months, over 120 apartments have sold at the project, which the Developers Group has marketed since inception. The Real Deal reported in the beginning of the month that 165 units of the two buildings’ combined 565 residences, or 30 percent, have closed thus far, and over 100 more are in contract. The Woolworth Building, Levine tells Osher, is his favorite building in the world. [more]
34 Greene Street and Sorgente’s Veronica MainettiSales launched recently at the Sorgente Group’s 34 Greene Street, a new seven-unit Soho condo with plenty of elegant touches, and foreign buyers have since been paying it a lot of attention. Sorgente, which purchased the Flatiron Building last year and has been rumored to be zeroing in on the Woolworth Building, acquired 34 Greene in 2007. “Initially, it was primarily Europeans [looking for] a pied-a-terre,” said Jason Karadus of Prudential Douglas Elliman, who is the listing broker. “Europeans are less interested in things like a spa, a concierge and cold storage, and a lot of bells and whistles. They want something a little more quintessentially New York.” The condo may not have fancy amenities, but it does have a 5,000-square-foot duplex penthouse with 15-foot ceilings and 2,200 square feet of private outdoor space — which has been readied for the installation of a swimming pool. The penthouse is listed at $13.75 million and has already received a $10 million all-cash offer, which Sorgente’s Veronica Mainetti turned down. Downstairs, a European buyer has already snapped up a two-bedroom, 1,997-square-foot unit. It is in contract for about $4 million. [Post] [more]
From the January issue:
For more than a year, foreign investors have been sitting on the
sidelines waiting for a sign that the capital markets were beginning to
thaw and the time was right to invest in New York real estate.
One of the first big tests for them may be coming from an unlikely
source: the Sorgente Group, a Rome-based investment firm that has
already acquired some of the city’s most iconic properties and is
currently negotiating to buy another — the famed Woolworth Building in
Lower Manhattan.
In addition to those Gotham properties, the group, headed by
investor Valter Mainetti, is reportedly in talks to acquire some of the
most sought-after buildings in the United States, including San
Francisco’s TransAmerica Pyramid. More
A 12-story office building at 31 West 27th Street has been picked up by real estate investment firm Soho Properties, the Observer reported. The 108,594-square-foot property, which Soho chairman and CEO Sharif El-Gamal called “probably the best B building in this submarket,” went for $45.7 million, $14.2 million more than the Witkoff Group paid for it in 2006. Witkoff may also be selling its 51 percent stake in the Woolworth Building, reportedly to the Italian Sorgente Group. [NYO]
New York real estate investor Rubin Schron and real estate attorney Leonard Grunstein have been accused of taking $50 million in kickbacks from Omnicare, a pharmaceutical company that serves the nursing home companies they each head. Schron, who owns the Woolworth Building, and Grunstein, a partner at Troutman Sanders, were two-thirds of a group that covered up a $50 million payout they received from Omnicare that enabled the company to continue to provide services at Mariner Health Care and Sava Senior Care, according to a complaint filed today by the U.S. Department of Justice. In the cover-up scheme, the trio allegedly masked the money as a payment for Omnicare’s acquisition of a two-person Mariner business unit that was not worth nearly $50 million. Omnicare will be forced to pay $98 million to states and to the federal government to settle the Medicare and Medicaid fraud charges associated with the case. [Crain’s]
From the September issue: The developers of 184 Kent, the high-end rental building about to open in Williamsburg, will be hitting the streets of the Lower East Side in a van, looking to take well-to-do hipsters to the Brooklyn waterfront.
They won’t actually be driving them there. But the idea is to troll for arty, young Lower East Side-type professionals where they live and hang out, parking the van — plastered in ads based on the quirky “WilliamsburgLove” mock dating site — in front of popular clubs.
“We’re looking at the Avalon Bowery project on Chrystie Street in the Lower East Side as comparables,” says Jason Halpern, managing partner of the building’s owner, JMH Development. more [more]
